


were from dungeons

by thatgirlwho



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12054570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatgirlwho/pseuds/thatgirlwho
Summary: “Galahad,” Eggsy greets him. He holds out his hand as easily as he speaks this received pronunciation.“Former, actually,” Harry replies, taking Eggsy’s offered hand.The smile Harry gives him, though: sudden, warm, slightly crooked in a disarming way.Eggsy wonders if Lancelot should have warned him about that.





	were from dungeons

**Author's Note:**

> Based off a prompt that speculated of what would happen if someone else had proposed Eggsy as a candidate but Harry had still known Lee. I fudged with the Marines timeline a bit for this.
> 
> To listen: [Alcatraz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqRUimBDzzw) by Oliver Riot.

Lancelot warns him, _he’s a bit impersonal_ , complete with a knowing look and a tip of her chin.

He expects that same indifferent politeness, the scrutinizing looks, the obliging considerations. 

He’s met with a man wearing a suit made for him that doesn’t quite fit, neatly parted hair and a patch over his left eye.

Eggsy had read the file on him: Agent Galahad. Twenty-seven years of service as a Kingsman agent, proficient in armed combat and firearms, specialized in interrogation and expert at what Bors referred to, with a sneer, as the _bang and burn_. An impressive kill count in the unimaginable thousands. Old archive footage catalogued and organized for easy reference, used as training videos, both example and warning.

Eggsy knew everything there is to know about Harry Hart.

Status: deceased. Place of death: Kentucky. Cause of death: bullet to the head, clean shot, instant.

Now, back from the dead.

“Galahad,” Eggsy greets him. He holds out his hand as easily as he speaks this received pronunciation. 

“Former, actually,” Harry replies, taking Eggsy’s offered hand.

The smile Harry gives him, though: sudden, warm, slightly crooked in a disarming way.

Eggsy wonders if Lancelot should have warned him about that.

\- -

Eggsy had been at RM Tamar when the signal went live.

But the base operated on a closed communications system; there were guards at every entrance, electric fences, watch dogs. 

He had been training in shifts, up all night on tactical drills and night operations, sleeping during the day.

He had only woken when someone had thrown his combat fatigues at him, shouted for him to _wake the fuck up_.

His boots were still unlaced when the barracks officer rushed in, face red and sweating, told them to stand down. 

They watched the carnage from a guard tower outside. They had to pry the Beretta from Eggsy’s clenched hands afterwards.

\- -

It had been Bors who had recruited him. 

He was a sentinel in the mess hall while he was in Solna, there because there was nothing left of Sweden’s parliament or military, a royal family—as one of the papers had put it—’slaughtered like pigs’, scanning the compound with a closed-off kind of intrigue. 

Eggsy had spotted him right away, knew when he was being sized up. Pegged him as scout for Commandos, maybe SRR. But he bore no medals on his chest, nothing to denote his rank. Eggsy had watched him from the corner of his eye that entire morning as he went about his duties.

Mitchell told him later like it was a secret while they were counting the shipment of Red Cross cargo, “He’s here from Buckingham.”

“What, here to make us march the courtyard in bearskins?”

Mitchell had huffed while Eggsy laughed, throwing him a heavy box of blankets that nearly knocked the wind out of Eggsy. “No, you fuck. Like, for the Queen’s personal guard.”

Eggsy had spotted the man again, in his pristine suit and the black framed glasses, watching them across the tarmac. Even when he wasn’t looking right at him, Eggsy knew the man was judging them, measuring them on some impossible scale.

It was until a month later that Eggsy saw him again. Bors came into the barracks, saluted the officer who had escorted him with all the grace and respect of a man who had served. Eggsy stood at parade rest until Bors had flapped his hand impatiently at him, told him it wasn’t necessary.

He still wearing the same suit as the first time Eggsy had seen him. He adjusted the cuffs of his shirt sleeves and offered Eggsy a job. 

To be a Kingsman.

“So, it is a Queen’s guard,” Eggsy had said, only mildly pissed that Mitchell had been right.

Bors had laughed and it was the first and last time Eggsy heard that sound from him. 

“We are an intelligence agency operating at the highest levels of discretion.”

“What, like a spy?”

“Precisely,” Bors said.

\- -

He thought Merlin’s cautionary speech to him and the rest of the recruits was just empty scare tactics. He’d smirked at the body bag, wrote Dean’s name on the place marked ‘next of kin’ and tossed the marker onto the bed.

Then, he almost drowned in a room suddenly filled with water.

Then, he jumped from an airplane and was told he had no parachute. 

Then, he woke up tied to train tracks and asked to reveal Kingsman’s secrets or die.

Then, he was given a gun and told to shoot the dog.

He did.

He really wasn’t expecting it to be a blank.

Merlin had to gently pry his fingers from where he had gripped his fist so hard around the gun, his knuckles ached.

Bors had handed him a glass of scotch that Eggsy hated and told him, “Bloody well done.”

Eggsy had only nodded and drank his scotch.

\- - 

He knew the suits, the blade hidden in the toe of the Oxfords, the watch with the amnesia darts, the lighter that doubled as grenade, the signet ring he wore that he had used to electrocute drug dealers, human traffickers, government officials selling black market information.

He knew Dressing Room three, all the wonderful treasures it held that debilitated and exploded and poisoned. He was unpleasantly familiar with the washing station, the sterilized needles and thread for stitches, the bottles of painkillers and antiseptics and numbing creams.

He knew the agents as code names and percentages of successful missions and their specializations before their designations.

He did not know Harry. 

“I would like to get to know you better,” Harry had said one evening as they both rode back on the shuttle. “Could I buy you a drink some time?”

Eggsy had looked up at him, guarded. “What do you want to know?”

The look Harry leveled at him, set with curiosity and a challenge, made Eggsy interested. 

\- -

Harry didn’t care if Eggsy showed up for drinks at the pub in civvies and a snapback, even when Eggsy ever hardly saw him without a suit. Didn’t care that Eggsy couldn’t stand that taste of scotch. Didn’t care that Eggsy talked like he still lived in the estate because it’s how Eggsy felt most comfortable.

Harry drank Guinness like it was water, poured his scotch neat and drank it just as fast, had a stuffed dog in his loo and let Eggsy make fun of him for it. 

He invited Eggsy round for drinks and supper at least once a week, taught him to make martinis in his tiny kitchen like a proper posh wanker, showed him upstairs to his office and let Eggsy poke around his Sun covers, let him ask questions about the spy life and his life and the past and any probable future late into the night.

But—Harry also asked about Eggsy. About what he thought of Kingsman, about his tests scores and his last mission, if he would do this differently, if he was happy with a certain outcome. Asked about his podgy little dog and what he did on the weekends, what kind of movies he watched, the music he listened to. He asked about his mum and Daisy and what they were like, if they were settling in well. He listened with intent, with kindness that never felt like a false courtesy. 

He always wanted to talk about Eggsy, always wanted to know more.

And Eggsy talked about himself, growing happy and warm with it, and knowing he couldn’t just blame the alcohol. 

No one really asked about him, where he’d come from, what he was still like when he didn’t wear the suit. Especially not Bors. 

“Wish you’d been around to propose me,” Eggsy said one evening, tasting the gin at the back of his tongue when he talked, languid and lazy.

Harry took a sip of his scotch. “Why is that?”

Eggsy shrugged, twirled his glass, worried his bottom lip between his teeth. “Bors is alright, gave me everything, he did.” Eggsy looked up at Harry, his broad shoulders in the warm glow of the desk light, the amber liquid in his glass nearly covered by his large hands. He had felt woozy, more drunk that he had any right to be. “But you’re a lot more fun.”

Harry smiled at him and Eggsy didn’t see that it didn’t quite reach his eye. “Well, thank you, Eggsy.”

“Could’ve been aces with that whole mentor thing, y’know? Taking me under your wing and all that.” Eggsy sighed, laughed at himself, looked at Harry almost expectantly. “Sounds stupid, don’t it?”

Harry hadn’t answered, just looked kind of sad like he felt sorry for Eggsy and his inebriated ramblings, and Eggsy felt too embarrassed to say it again. 

\- -

“Impersonal,” Eggsy had scoffed at Lancelot later, tossing a cello-wrapped sandwich into her lap, flopping down on the couch in her office while she peeled back the wrapping. “He’s the best one of the lot around here—besides you,” he added when she had given him a withering glare. “At least he don’t act like I’m here on some kinda favour or charity or some shit.”

Lancelot had made a dissenting noise and bit into her sandwich. “Lucky you, then.” She considered something as she chewed. “The way Merlin talked about him, I just thought he was.”

Eggsy grinned around his mouthful of egg salad. “He’s a proper gent. Taught me to make martini’s and everything.”

\- - 

He likes Harry.

He starts to worry if he should shave before he goes over to Harry’s. Puts on cologne before he meets Harry for drinks at the pub. Spends far too long thinking about what he should wear before he meets Harry for supper at their favourite place.

Fuck, they even have a _favourite place_.

One night, Harry’s mixing martinis and he makes a joke and Eggsy _knows_ he laughs too hard. The look Harry gives him tells Eggsy he knows it, too, and he doesn’t particularly seem to care.

“Enjoying your drink, Eggsy?” Harry had asked around a half-smile and the rim of his martini glass.

Eggsy took in the stretch of Harry’s mouth over the glass, the way his tongue darted out to lick at his lip, the pleased sigh he gave in appreciation. 

“Yeah, m’enjoying everything,” Eggsy answered.

 _Fuck_ , he _likes_ Harry.

\- -

Harry kisses him first. 

And Harry doesn’t kiss like anything else, doesn’t kiss like he fights (brutal, demanding, refined and chaotic), doesn’t kiss like he makes martinis (comfortable, practiced, learned and carefully), certainly doesn’t kiss like the gentleman he is (polite, reserved, brief and gentle).

Harry kisses Eggsy like he’s _scared_ to. Hands on either side of his face but still holding back, angling him back to kiss him deeper, enough to bruise, and not from desire. 

A need that doesn’t come from longing. 

Harry tastes like gin, like mint and something smoky, dizzying and intoxicating. 

Eggsy kisses him back because he thinks this is just the start. 

\- -

The first time he sees the medal, it’s when Tristan’s mission goes tits up, they loose contact with him for thirty-five hours and when Eggsy and Lancelot are sent in for extraction, they find him in a pool of his own vomit and blood, slumped over on himself still tied to the chair.

Lancelot crouched down in front of him, pushed his head back with two fingers to reveal a gaping wound in the middle of his forehead, eyes still wide open as if stuck in the suspended moment before his death. 

“Clean shot through,” Lancelot informs him, avoiding the blood on the floor with careful steps. “Not before they tortured him, though—busted kneecaps, missing fingernails, burn marks on his arms. Jesus Christ.”

Eggsy looks up and sees bits of white dotting the walls, like flecks of dust or snow. When he steps closer, he sees the spattered blood and sludgy grey brains and the shattered pieces of skull embedded into the plaster. 

He comes back to HQ with Tristan in a body bag, the taste of tin and bile at the back of his mouth, the blood under his fingernails. 

Eggsy’s in Dressing Room Three, shaking and trying to work up to swallowing down two Valium, when the door swings open and Andrew steps briskly through. 

“Sorry, sir,” Andrew tells him, nodding as he walks past.

Eggsy doesn’t even move, keeps his arms braced on the sink so he doesn’t suddenly collapse. 

He wants a strong drink. He wants to sleep for three days. He wants to see Harry and ask him how he will get through this. 

He knows Harry isn’t here, gone to Barcelona for a week. 

He wantsHarry even worse. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Andrew kneel to access a cupboard Eggsy’s never seen opened. From the alcove, Andrew pulls out a square wooden box, opens the lid and takes out what he needs, before securing the box back in its place. 

Eggsy sees the glint of gold, ribbon of navy and pink, before Andres hand closes over it. 

“What’s that?”

“Consolatory medals,” Andrew explains. “For the families and loved ones of fallen agents. A favour, provided by Kingsman, if they ever wish it.”

A man in a pin-striped suit. A snow globe that he shook harder than needed because his Mum was crying and he didn’t know why. Because the man had frightened him, a complete stranger.

Pink and gold, braided metal, a little clasp where he pinned it to his pillow later that night.

A blurry face, indistinct, older.

_You take care of this._

“Who gives them out?”

“Usually the agent’s mentor, if they are still alive. If not, it falls to Arthur.” 

Eggsy’s body runs hot then cold; a frantic, thudding beat setting his heart racing. He’s unable to think clearly, everything narrowing until it’s all dark and a pinpoint of light.

He leaves the shop in a panic, sits in the back of the taxi and tells himself he must have dreamt it, he’s got it wrong. But he knows he hasn’t. He takes the steps two at a time to his mum’s flat that Kingsman paid for, doesn’t even say hello when she peeks out from the kitchen, goes straight for the guest room to pull apart the boxes she hasn’t yet unpacked. 

“Eggsy, babe, what is it?” Her voice sounds so far away to him he doesn’t even register it right away. 

“The box,” he says, his voice tight in his throat. He waves his hands in front of him, as if the box will appear. “The box with all my stuff, in that little shoebox. Where is it?”

Michelle blinks at him. “Oh, I don’t know, there’s so many—”

“ _Mum_ ,” Eggsy says, voice rising to an unbearable degree, “think! Did you see it anywhere, anywhere at all!”

“Eggsy, what in god’s name—”

He dumps out the nearest box onto the floor, pushes his hands through the extra linens and assorted odds and ends, doesn’t find anything. He takes the next box, dumps it out beside him where he’s kneeling on the floor as his mum yells at him, demands to know what’s going on.

“The _medal_ , Mum!” The longer it takes to find it, the more chance it has of never existing, and he knows it did, he _needs_ that proof just as badly as he needs it to never have existed at all. “That stupid fucking medal I fuckin’ wore everywhere, where is it!”

She stands there, shocked and horrified at him, staring at the mess around him with the tea towel gripped in her hands and he realizes—

She doesn’t understand, either. 

\- -

He’s not given access to past recruitment files. A lot of missions, even to the round table, remain classified. 

There are no portraits hung in the halls for dead recruits.

But the next time he steps foot into the Kingsman shop, it’s like he feels his dad is there in all the hidden corners he never went looking in. 

\- -

“Two targets, forty paces on your right coming from a room,” Merlin’s voice tells him coming in a thousand miles away over the comms. 

Eggsy breathes in deeply through his nose. Sights the targets once they emerge and takes them out. Shakes out his hand to get rid of the nerves because his aim was off and the second head shot wasn’t so clean. 

There’s a moment of pause, where Eggsy knows Merlin noticed this, but Merlin doesn’t say.

“Clear for the rest of the corridor. Third door on the left.” Merlin waits for Eggsy to start moving, then says, “You’re distracted.”

Eggsy grunts, find the third door, rattles the doorknob; locked but loose in it’s hold. He clicks the safety back on and slips his gun back into his holster, braces his arm and starts to ram the door open with his shoulder. 

“Very discreet,” Merlin says unhappily. Another pause when the door finally busts open, the hinges slightly bent, and Eggsy’s shoulder aching. “We have movement. Floor above you.”

Eggsy slips into the darkened room, checks the magazine on his gun, flicks the safety back off. “How many?”

“At least twelve.”

“Perfect,” Eggsy replies, kicking his way through the dark room and it’s debris, finding a corner with a good vantage point of the door, a stack of boxes to hide behind, a ledge to prop up his throbbing elbow up on. “Need to left off a little steam.”

“What’s going on with you?” Merlin’s crackles over comms, starting to get drowned out by the thundering footsteps overhead. 

_Someone in Kingsman knew my dad. And you’ve been keeping it from me_.

There’s shouting, indiscernible, outside the door. Banging, thumping, the click and slide of rifles and semi-automatics being readied. 

“Nothing, Merlin. Never better,” Eggsy says and shoots the first man who steps through the door. 

\- -

He finds the medal in his things, the memory box shoved to the back of his closet in his home, where he’d found it looking for a pair of trainers he was sure he had put there.

Inside, under a faded photograph of his dad and his old gymnastics ribbons and a cassette tape he wasn’t even sure what was on it anymore, he finds it. 

He hadn’t looked at it in years, even hated it for the longest time, how it reminded him constantly that his dad was gone and wasn’t coming back. Had thrown it in the rubbish, had listened to Dean laugh at him when he had to dig through crushed beer cans and half-rotted apples and cigarettes butts to find it later.

Somewhere along the way, he’d forgotten what it was for, what purpose it served. 

He wonders what Kingsman would give him if he called the number now. 

\- -

 _Someone in Kingsman knew my dad._

Tell Merlin. 

_Someone in Kingsman knew my dad._

Tell Lancelot. 

_Someone in Kingsman knew my dad._

Tell Arthur. Tell Andrew. Tell Bors. 

_Someone in Kingsman knew my dad._

Tell Harry. 

\- -

There’s a Sun cover on Harry’s wall that matches the date on the back of the medal. 

_Don’t_ tell Harry. 

\- -

Eggsy doesn’t have access to recruitment files. 

He has archive footage. Access to agent missions and backlogs. Digital copies, scans and reports. 

He has the start date of Lancelot trials, June 3rd 1997, names blacked out and information redacted. 

He has the end date of Lancelot trials, December 19 1997.

He has those dates and Andrew’s ledger, still written in pen in a book with a black leather cover, the man’s painstaking attention to detail and need for thoroughness. He has the ledger that tells him Andrew entered Dressing Room Three and took out that wooden box on the same date as what was on the back of his medal. 

On the Sun cover in Harry’s office, four from the bottom, six from the left. 

On the mission titled _Operation Desert Storm_. 

Status: success. 

Causalities: one target and an unidentified friendly. 

He has the formal introduction of James Weston as Agent Lancelot into the round table buried in the minutes of an inconspicuous morning debrief: December 20, 1997.

\- -

The medal looks dull and unimportant in the soft, hazy glow of Harry’s desk light. Where Eggsy had thrown it to land with a soft thump on the stack of papers Harry was reading.

Harry doesn’t look up, completely still, hands braced on either side of the desk.

Eggsy’s not even sure if Harry can see the medal, or if he’s looking past it, as if it’s entirely invisible to him.

“You knew him,” Eggsy says.

Eggsy watches as Harry reaches out for the medal, picks it up warily like it would burn him if he did, and place it in the palm of his other hand.

“I mean, has to be you.”

Harry looks up at him then, the one good eye shadowed, the downturn of his mouth betraying his exhaustion, his long-lived years.

“Couldn’t be the old Lancelot,” Eggsy says decisively, hands shoved in his trouser pockets, his heart pounding to where his chest ached horribly and he thought he shouldn’t be able to speak, such a wrenching, throbbing thing it was. “He wouldn’t have had the clearance, just being a recruit then. And it ain’t Merlin, he can’t give out the medals, I know that. He’s just support staff.”

Harry looks back down to his open palm and the medal laying there.

“It weren’t Arthur that showed up at my house, I know that. I remember that.” Eggsy stepped forward. “I remember _you_.”

Harry’s jaw clenches. His mouth opens, then closes. He stares at the medal, at the empty tumbler at his left, at something in the corner of the room. 

He does not look at Eggsy. 

“I knew your father. He saved my life.”

Eggsy curls his hands into fists, digs the knuckles into his thighs. 

“I knew since I came back. Since I first saw you. I didn’t even need to know your name.” Harry sets the medal down with such deliberate care that it doesn’t make a sound. “You are so very like him.”

Something unforgiving and vicious reaches deep inside his chest and pulls, hard. 

“Fuck you.”

“He would be very proud of you, Eggsy.”

Eggsy shakes his head, closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the pleading, repentant look on Harry’s face. “Shut the fuck up.”

“He only wanted the best for you—”

“You don’t get to talk about him!” Eggsy yells at Harry, when he doesn’t have to, doesn’t want to because it sounds so close to breaking. “I never even got to know him, Harry, _fuck you_. You’ve got no right, no fucking right. Not after this.”

Harry looks lost, his gaze flickering back down to the medal he had set aside, his stack of forgotten papers, his hands with the palms flat on the desk.

“I never fuckin’ knew him. And you couldn’t even tell me that you did,” Eggsy mutters.

“I didn’t want you to think that I was—” Harry’s hands spread out in front of him like an offering of penance, “ _kind_ to you, because of him. Because of this.”

Kind, Eggsy thinks. 

_He’s a bit impersonal._

_Just_ kind, he thinks.

“Yeah?” Eggsy asks. “And what do you think I’m thinking ‘bout you now?”

\- -

Eggsy knows Kingsman.

He knows Lancelot, who seems fondly exasperated by his antics, and Bors, who seems ashamed of them but is too polite to say so.

He knows how to dismantle a SIG Sauer P226 in record time, knows how to use the empty magazine as a weapon in it’s own right, knows where to slam the muzzle on someone’s throat to permanently disable them.

He knows that somewhere in locked database archives he won’t ever see is his father’s name and picture and recruitment statistics listed amongst a roster of others, his life condensed to verifiable facts, a black and white photograph, just a name.

He knows the weight of the medal he had once forgotten, the sound it makes when it’s thrown against walls, cement, metal, the clink it makes against a wooden desk, the outline of the etched numbers pressed against his fingers.

He knows that, for Kingsman, he will lie and be lied to.

For Kingsman, he allows this: to be caught in the lies that everyone else is aware of, that no one addresses, that no one is bothered by.

But Harry didn’t do this for Kingsman. He didn’t do this for Eggsy, either.

Eggsy knows that.


End file.
